Americans' concerns about moral decline

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Tue Jun 29 21:34:33 PDT 1999


Kelley wrote:


>forgot to say this earlier: the book is a reflexive critique of
>post-colonial studies, the essentialism therein, and the tendency to avoid
>marxist class analyses in p-c studies.

Well this sounds promising, though again I cannot glean from Eagleton's review 1. what her critique of essentialism amounts to (an elision of class or something else?)and 2. what kind of marxist class analysis she builds her analysis on(there is an excellent review of the several currents in contemporary Marxist class theory in Robert F Sitton *Recent Marxian Theory*). At any rate, this does not seem to be the same book you had earlier described thusly: "from what i read she writes about the movie "passage to india," about hegel, charlotte bronte, mary shelly, jane eyre, and the Asiatic mode of Production. i don't see why eagleton can't speak to her work."

Sure he can speak to such analyses in her book; he just didn't--not in the excerpts you downloaded here. Maybe he did speak to the new version of what the book is about. I'll have to rely on what you say the book is about. I glanced at the first few pages in the bookstore (esp the pages on the theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production), and do not plan to read it, given current research interests and writing responsibilities.

she's not writing about representations of third-world people.
>i don't see eagleton as speculating on her subaltern psychology but on her
>very real difficulties negotiating the institutional setting of academia in
>the US

yes, this is what he decided to focus on.


>and criticizing her for failing to set forth some alternative rather
>than engaging in largely in critique.

This seems like a rather meaningless criticism at least in the form Eagleton has given it.

Yours, Rakesh



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